...well, he does have a very strange t aste in holidays

JEREMY CORBYN is no stranger to taking budget holidays in unglamorous corners of Eastern Europe.

The Labour leader’s first wife, Jane Chapman, revealed how the pair endured a miserable camping holiday during the summer of 1976 as they toured the region on a rickety 250cc motorbike. While Ms Chapman wanted to sleep in a comfortable bed at night and dine in interesting restaurants, Mr Corbyn insisted on staying in a small tent and cooking tins of baked beans on a single-ring gas stove, a biography of the Labour leader disclosed earlier this year.

Their trip, at the height of the Cold War, involved riding from Austria through the Iron Curtain and into Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia. This meant crossing a frontier bristling with minefields, electrified barbed wire and guard towers.

Their Czech-made motorbike broke down after they arrived in the Eastern-bloc country, much to Mr Corbyn’s anger, the biography by journalist Tom Bower revealed.

It had been made exclusively for export and Czech garage mechanics struggled to fix it and obtain spare parts. The couple’s tent was also flooded during a rainstorm in Prague, the Czech capital. Mr Corbyn grudgingly agreed to spend the night elsewhere – but in a student hostel, rather than in a hotel.

He was reportedly indifferent to the beauty of some of Europe’s most impressive sites.

While in Vienna, Austria’s stunning capital, he refused to enter the Schonbrunn Palace because it was ‘royal’, while he said the city’s beautiful Ringstrasse, a three-mile-long grand boulevard, was ‘capitalist’.

‘He walked past all the museums and art galleries, and found no pleasure in medieval towns,’ Mr Bower wrote in his biography, Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot For Power.

In August 2017, Mr Corbyn cycled along the Adriatic coast in Croatia and was pictured strolling round Dubrovnik. Last summer he enjoyed a ‘staycation’ in Somerset.